Team | FRANK Autonomous

The Team

Izen Thornton

Built FRANK end to end. Employee #6 on DoorDash's drone flight-operations team. 400+ UAS hours. CAP UAS Check Pilot Examiner. FEMA certified Planning Section Chief.

Brandon LiWang

Cofounder · Hardware & Test

Owns the runtime, link layer and field test. UC Berkeley MEng; UAVs@Berkeley. Hardware Engineer at Sentradel. IEEE-published on autonomous gas source detection.

Aaron Shey

Cofounder · Software & ML

Owns the policy and the simulator. UC Berkeley Cognitive Science. Research apprentice at Berkeley's DNA Sequencing Facility (URAP): Python pipelines on Savio, Berkeley's supercomputer.

Advisory Board

Scott Nisbet

Founding Advisor

Co-Founder: Berkeley 100 Foundation, ArionBio. UC Berkeley alum. Mentor at SkyDeck, Deep Tech Innovation Lab, and Neurotech Collider Lab. Speaker, mentor, and coach for UC Berkeley SCET BMoE Bootcamp.

Aaron Estrada

Planetary Robotics Advisor

Mission Operations Engineer at Xona Space. NASA Lunabotics; IMAP CubeSat collaboration. TT&C, navigation, and planetary rover systems. BS Electrical Engineering, Sonoma State. MS Space Systems Engineering, Johns Hopkins. Civil Air Patrol emergency services.

Michael Thornton

Michael Thornton

Software Architecture Advisor

Software Architect at Zscaler. Software architect at Bluebeam, Recharge Payments, and Pulse Secure, where he architected a Zero Trust microservice platform. 25 years of distributed systems and platform design. Writes Dev Details.

Demir Erkiralp

Space Systems Advisor

UIUC Aerospace Engineering. AIAA Nuclear and Future Flight Propulsion Technical Committee; discipline chair for SciTech 2027. ANS 31.1 standards working group. First-author papers on nuclear thermal propulsion and regenerative cooling. Past President, Liquid Rocketry at Illinois. EF Fellow.

Get in touch

The lunar surface is our proving ground.

We're not building a rover company. We're building the autonomy layer for the planetary economy.

hello@frankautonomous.com →